Over the weekend, several opposition activists were arrested in the capital of Tunis after protesting a new government taxation on basic goods. The wave of protests comes on the heels of the seven-year anniversary of the death of Mohammad Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire in protest of the government’s policies. Bouazizi’s death on Jan. 4, 2011 – which helped spark protests that spread across the Middle East – is a highly emotive date for Tunisians.

The government’s response has been heavy-handed. The arrests sparked widespread condemnation and rallies across Tunisia. In response, the government deployed the military to several major towns and arrested hundreds of activists. Tunisian leaders insist the new taxes are necessary to satisfy international lenders and stabilize the economy; Tunisians have pointed to the new taxes as emblematic of a failed and oppressive government.

About $7.5 million of the settlement is the estimated scientific value of a planned donation of the company’s adult biological samples, tissues and cells to a nonprofit academic and scientific teaching institution affiliated with a major U.S. medical school, according to the agreement. Prosecutors did not disclose the name of the medical school.

The defendants also will donate and transfer laboratory storage containers and equipment estimated to be worth more than $10,000.

Cities today are about as politically diverse as the former Soviet Union; they are increasingly dominated by “the civic Left,” for which pragmatism and moderation represent weakness and compromise. The emergence of Trump seems to have deepened this instinct, with mayors such as de Blasio and Garcetti, Seattle’s Ed Murray, and Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges all playing leading roles in the progressive “resistance” against the president. Their anti-Trump posturing is mostly for show, but these mayors are pushing substantive — and increasingly radical — agendas of social engineering. Their initiatives include, in Los Angeles, imposing “road diets” on commuters to reduce car usage (while making traffic worse), as well as “green energy” schemes that raise energy prices. Most are committed to serving as “sanctuary” cities and enacting unprecedented hikes in the minimum wage in an effort to eliminate income inequality by diktat.

Many of these efforts clash with the aspirations of middle-class residents, who tend to drive cars, want to preserve their human-scale neighborhoods, and own small businesses highly sensitive to wage levels. Regulatory policies that seek to limit lower-density housing have led to escalating home prices in areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland. In these areas, housing costs (adjusted for income) are roughly two to three times higher than in places like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh.

They conclude with:

Rather than indulging feel-good radical experiments in social justice, cities need to rediscover their historical role as creators of the middle class, as Jane Jacobs put it. If they don’t, some extraordinary areas — in brownstone Brooklyn, much of Manhattan, Seattle, west Los Angeles, and San Francisco — will likely become ever more exclusive, divided between the rich and the hip (many of whom are their subsidized children) and surrounding poor populations working in low-end services (or not working). The policy emphasis should shift to middle-income areas — whether in the Sunset district of San Francisco, Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Queens, or South Brooklyn — and closer suburbs, which could keep some younger families in the urban orbit. Such a shift will require a new kind of urban politics, one that encourages grassroots industries and corporate relocations that create more middle-income jobs, promotes the flourishing of human-scale neighborhoods, and accommodates families with good schools and low crime. The appeal of urban living remains viable, though today’s urban political class sometimes seems determined to kill it.

But the plans break serious new ground on the legal front, giving federal agents more leeway to deny illegal immigrants at the border, to arrest and hold them when they’re spotted in the interior, and to deport them more speedily. The goal, the White House said, is to ensure major changes to border security, interior enforcement and the legal immigration system.

Later:

All told, the list includes 27 different suggestions on border security, 39 improvements to interior enforcement and four major changes to the legal immigration system.

Put another way: The right to keep and bear arms would still be there without the Second Amendment. Like the right not to suffer political or religious repression, it exists with or without the law. It is an aspect of the human being, not an aspect of the governments that human beings institute among themselves. The state does not grant the right — the state exists because the right exists and needs protecting from time to time. The state protects our rights from criminals and marauders, and the Constitution protects our rights from their protectors.

No doubt that sounds like a lot of crazy talk to many of our progressive friends. “Rights from God! Imagine!” That is a critical failure of our most progressive institution, the schools, which consistently neglect — or decline — to provide our students with even a rudimentary education in American civics and the history of the American idea. It isn’t that the modern left-winger is obliged to accept the intellectual and philosophical basis of the American order, but he ought to understand that things are the way they are for a reason. The idea that the Second Amendment could simply be repealed —that’s that! — isn’t only an attack on the right to keep and bear arms: It is an attack on the American constitutional order per se. That our progressive friends often are so pristinely ignorant of the moral order underpinning the American founding is one of their great intellectual failures. They do not understand the American idea, and, as a result, they do not really understand their own ideas, either.

Because our political identities are shaped by tribalism rather than by reason, creating a political culture that embraces healthy experimentation and iterative, incremental reform is difficult for us to do. What we do instead is put together unwieldy bundles of legislation that promise to solve a particular problem for now and for all time — and then accuse the other side of being evil for opposing it. That isn’t government — it’s performance art.

The Department of Defense concluded that an Osprey crash off Japan’s coast last December was the result of pilot error. The Osprey’s pilots hit and severed a fuel hose while refueling in mid-air from a MC–130, and the engine damage they suffered as a result required them to ditch the plane. They chose a controlled landing in the ocean to avoid the possibility of crashing into a civilian area on land.

So Trump supporters are now in a situation where it looks like, by the end of his first year in office, there will be no wall, no mass deportations, no Obamacare repeal, no tax reform—but there will be multiple extension of the debt ceiling and a permanent legislative version of amnesty for some illegal aliens. But hey, we’ll always have Neil Gorsuch!

The face of the Democratic Party has increasingly become the face of celebrity, scold, and entitlement. The people they used to attract to their “stand for the working class” creed have faded from their reach; they have lost touch with their needs and values and they certainly have lost touch with any type of meaningful message.

They do not celebrate hard work, they demand supporters are pro-abortion, expect them to be agnostic and also expect them to stand for their multitude of identity politics; instead of bringing people together and being part of a greater political party, division is the only way forward.

Dreher: From a strictly political point of view, what do Americans not understand about the situation Christians in the Middle East face — not just in war zones, but elsewhere?

Doran: Americans probably don’t understand the extent to which their public servants in DC really don’t care. The foreign policy establishment, like the public culture in America, has a general contempt (often masquerading as indifference) for Christians. This is ironic because the Christians are the progressives of their societies in the Middle East.

Unlike the coup d’etat that sees a military or popular figure lead a minority resistance or majority force into power over the legitimate government, this coup d’etat is leaderless and exposes some of the deepest fissures in our system of government. This coup d’etat represents not the rule of one man or even many, but by the multitude of our elites.

Later:

Complicit with the authoritarian nature of the administrative state is factions within the United States intelligence community both inside and outside the White House. They have engaged in a campaign of selective leaks and plots to undermine the president of the United States and weave a media narrative of Russian influence, conspiracy, and now obstruction of justice. With their media allies, they have leaked information and intelligence that — while lacking any actual criminal element — has allowed a narrative to arise that casts a dark shadow over the White House and those who live and work in it.

The most successful presidents don’t sweat the small stuff. They focus on one or two or three things they want to accomplish, laws they want to pass, initiatives they want to launch, countries they want to invade. Details are left to underlings. The president is there to uphold the integrity of the office, attend ceremonial functions, use the bully pulpit when he can, and decide on matters of personnel and national security. Recently, though, it has seemed as if the small stuff is the only thing Donald Trump sweats. Negative coverage, personal slights, how one performs onscreen, the light fixtures and flat-screen televisions in the residence—this is what animates him, what captures his attention.

Presidents sell agendas: supply-side economics and missile defense, the war on drugs and Desert Storm, the budget and crime bills and welfare reform, the tax cut and prescription drug bills and No Child Left Behind, the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and Obamacare. Trump sells himself. What happens in Washington these days isn’t politics. It’s brand extension. Which is why the Russia probe agitates him so. Not only because it’s an investigation into email hacks and lobbying and tax records, but also because it’s an attempt to discredit his brand, to subvert his reputation as a winner.

On my first night in town, a beat-up car parks next to me, positioned in the darkness cast by my van. The passenger, a middle-aged woman, injects the driver in the neck. He stays still, head tilted to expose a vein, as she works the needle in, while two young boys play in the back seat.

Done, they pull away as I try to fool myself into thinking I didn’t see what I saw.

Despite the appalling women’s rights abuses that flourish as a matter of state policy in Saudi Arabia, the UN allows secret ballots for voting countries onto its various commissions, regardless of each country’s specific record in that area. In this case, the UN wouldn’t want to object because it would violate one of the organization’s central tenets: no country, system of belief, or cultural practice is superior or inferior to another. It’s textbook progressive multiculturalism. The UN simply ignores Saudi Arabia’s record and allows that the treatment of women in Saudi society is just part of the culture. Different but equal.

In the UN’s deranged reasoning, the Saudis have just as much of a right to sit on a commission for women’s rights as any other country does. But this is pure fiction, and makes the UN look ridiculous. In its slavish devotion to multiculturalism, the UN has created a fantasy utopia that is unmoored from the world in which the women they claim to want to help actually live.

Confucius Institutes are centers of Chinese soft power. Ostensibly they share Chinese language and culture out of Chinese generosity. Realistically, they offer China an opportunity to shape how future scholars and leaders of rival nations think about China. The United States has 103 Confucius Institutes at colleges and universities, and 501 Confucius Classrooms at K–12 schools.

Liu’s film offers glimpses into China’s goals for its Confucius Institutes, which an agency of the Chinese government, the Hanban, operates and funds. She splices together TV shots of Hanban executive director Xu Lin (a member of the Chinese government’s highest committee, the 35-member State Council) expressing her delight that top universities in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere “work for us” by hosting Confucius Institutes.